Page 132 of Every Almost

"This is still the problem, Cap. Once we're back on the Emberkind, we need to get the Aetherfin from the shuttle bay through the corridors and into the sphere. Every meter of that corridor is standard gravity which, as we all know, the Aetherfin can't survive in. Even a few seconds of exposure would crush their skeletal structure."

Reyna watched as he pressed a button on his datapad and ran the new simulation on the display. A blue field expanded from the sphere toward the shuttle bay, a single bubble of zero-G pushing through standard gravity. At the eleven-second mark, the boundary flickered and disappeared. Red warning indicators flashed across the display.

"I've been trying to push the zero-G field outward from the sphere through the corridor," Tavi continued. "One continuous field. But the boundary between zero-G and standard gravity is a hard line. Anything biological that crosses it gets torn apart by the instantaneous shift. And every time I run the simulation, the field destabilizes at the edges. As you just saw, it holds for about eleven seconds and then collapses."

Reyna stared at the display, her realization catching up with reality. They were running out of time.

"As we talked about before, Cap," Tavi continued. "The software side is taken care of and should work like a dream. Thephysics of the boundary is the problem, and, frankly, I've run out of ideas." Tavi was staring at her, his expression leaving nothing hidden.

The silence held. Cael shifted against the wall but said nothing.

"I see," Reyna finally said.

"What if you don't cross it?"

Charlie's voice echoed through the room as everyone looked at her.

Reyna turned. Charlie had stopped tapping her thigh. She was staring at Tavi's simulation on the display, her head tilted slightly to one side, her eyes tracking the red boundary line where the zero-G field kept failing.

Charlie straightened and walked toward the main display. "You're trying to push one zero-G field through the corridor in a single bubble. That's why the boundary keeps failing. The edge is too hard. One field, one wall, one point of failure."

She reached the console and looked at Tavi. "May I try something?"

"Be my guest," Tavi replied, clearly excited to hear what Charlie had to say.

Charlie's hands moved across the interface, pulling up the corridor schematic. She began moving pieces around on the console display, leaving it in her working hands before pushing it to the main display in front of all of them. Then, after a flourish to press a singular button, a new simulation started playing on the display.

"Don't use one field. Use six."

Tavi's eyebrows rose. "Six?"

"Pressurization staging," Charlie said. "On Earth, when we need to move something from atmosphere to vacuum, we don't do it in one step. We use airlocks. Each chamber brings the pressure down incrementally until you reach vacuum. No singletransition is extreme enough to cause damage." She drew six zones across the corridor schematic displayed on the screen. "In this case, I don't see why you can't apply the same principle to gravity."

She labeled each zone. "Full gravity in the shuttle bay. Then 80%. Then 60%. 40%. 20%. 5%. And then zero in the sphere. Six independent zones, each calibrated separately. Each transition is small enough that the Aetherfin drift through without ever hitting a shear boundary."

"Wait," Tavi said. "The Aetherfin can't survive in ANY gravity. Even 80% would crush them."

"They won't be in 80%," Charlie said. "The Aetherfin stay inside their zero-G containment field the entire time. The gradient isn't for them. It's for the field itself. When you push a zero-G bubble through full gravity, the external pressure on the boundary is massive, and that's why it keeps collapsing. But if the gravity outside the bubble decreases in stages, the pressure differential at each boundary is small enough that the field holds. The Aetherfin are always in zero-G. The gradient just makes sure their bubble doesn't pop."

The room went quiet. Charlie looked up from the console. Her eyes found Reyna's before raising her eyebrows and giving her a little shrug. Reyna raised her eyebrows and nodded slowly at Charlie before turning to Tavi.

"Tavi? What say you?"

Tavi was staring at the schematic for what seemed like a long time. But then he said, "That's it." Then Tavi's eyes went wide and a grin broke across his face. "Captain, that's fucking it!"

"Language, Tavi," Selowen said from the background.

"Sorry, Sel," he replied, then turned back to Reyna. "Cap,that'sthe solve."

His hands were already moving across his datapad. "If each zone is independent, the software calibrates them individually.No single boundary carries the full load. The transition is smooth, continuous?—"

"Survivable," Maren finished. She went very still, her violet-gray eyes sharpening as schematics cascaded through her memory. "The corridor gravity systems can support zone generation. I'd need to modify six junction points, but the hardware is already there. I can see every schematic. It works."

Tavi looked at Reyna. "Captain, this is it. The pressurization model solves the boundary problem completely."

Reyna looked at the schematic on the display. Six zones, clean and elegant, designed by a woman from a pre-spaceflight planet using principles she'd learned building rockets. Somehow, she was both entirely impressed but also entirely impressed but also not surprised at all that Charlie was the one to have figured it out. Funny, that she felt that way after Charlie had only been on the Emberkind for a little over two weeks.

She took a moment to look over at Charlie, who was standing at the console with her hands still on the interface, waiting. Her eyes met Reyna's, and, their gazes met together in the middle and held. Acknowledgement, acceptance, and gratitude all seemed to fly back and forth between them over just a glance.